Daughter of the Yellow Dragon

 

 

MANDUHAI WAS BORN IN 1448, THE STRONGEST AND most imperial of all the zodiac years, and the only one with a sign designated for a supernatural being: the Yellow Dragon. According to some records at the time of her birth, her parents lived well south of the Gobi, possibly near the oasis of Hami in modern Xinjiang; according to another tradition, she was born on the Tumed Plain in the vicinity of what later became the city of Hohhot, the capital of today’s Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. In either case, she grew up in relatively arid zones of what is now northern China, and this area and type of environment remained sentimentally important to her throughout her life.

By the mid-fifteenth century, the clan system created and imposed by Genghis Khan had totally deteriorated, but a new one had not yet emerged. The Mongols had returned to the political chaos that preceded their unification in 1206. Clusters of formerly unaffiliated families formed expedient amalgamations that sometimes took an ancient name or sometimes a new one. An individual’s tribal or lineage allegiance might change several times during a lifetime, and even if the group remained the same, the name could be altered.

Manduhai was a member of one such clan conglomerate, the Choros, which included members of the defunct Onggud and Kara Kitai as well as the still surviving Uighurs, Oirat, and Uriyanghai. The Choros clan had recently ascended to unprecedented power under the leadership of Esen, and Manduhai was born at the height of his power, just before he launched his campaign to exterminate the Borijin. Soon after Manduhai’s birth, around 1451, Esen appointed her father, Chororsbasi-Temur, as chingsang, an office somewhat like prime minister, of his newly united Oirat-Mongol nation. Despite this grand title, Chororsbasi-Temur and his family continued to live the pastoral life of Mongol nomads.

The Choros clan occupied part of the former Onggud territory that had been ruled by Alaqai Beki and then annexed by Khubilai Khan’s Yuan Dynasty. Soon after the fall of the dynasty in 1368, however, soldiers of the new Ming Dynasty burned the Onggud cities and killed or chased away the people. The Onggud nearly lost their tradition of literacy, and the royal family no longer functioned with enough independent power to make its own marriages. The Onggud returned to the countryside as herders while trying to maintain some meager trade that echoed pathetically the lucrative trading empire they had once commanded along the Silk Route. They had declined from the ranks of an ancient Turkic nation under the queen Alaqai Beki to being just one more of the many poor Mongol tribes struggling to survive in the ruins of a glorious, but lost, empire. It was as though the empire and cities had never even existed.

The Uighur still held a geographic base in the oases of China’s western deserts, and although significantly diminished in importance, they survived as an ethnic group. By the time that Manduhai’s father assumed responsibility for the region, the Onggud name was no longer used; the people were lumped together under a variety of other ethnic names, including Oirat and Uighur.

Manduhai’s clan recognized a special spiritual relationship with their founding Mother Tree common to many of the Turkic tribes; the Choros, like the Uighurs, acknowledged no mythological father. For the Mongols, the primary mythological dyad consisted of the Earth Mother and the Sky Father. For Manduhai’s clan, the primary spiritual pair consisted of mother and son, symbolized by the tree and her offspring or the mother wolf who raised an orphan boy.

Manduhai probably had some kinship connection to Samur Gunj, but its importance would be difficult to calculate. Manduhai was only six years old when her father, although he had been appointed by Esen, joined the resistance to Esen and particularly to the policy of exterminating the Borijin. It is not possible to determine if her father and Samur Gunj were actually allied conspirators in their opposition or merely found themselves as common enemies of Esen.

By the time Manduhai was old enough to be aware of what was happening around her, the momentary unity and vitality of the Esen era had ended. Despite her father’s role in overthrowing Esen, neither her father nor any of the other rebels could maintain control of the miniature empire Esen had assembled. Without Esen, the system collapsed back into near anarchy on the steppe.

Even the Mongol chroniclers could not keep up with the comings and goings of episodic claimants to the office of khan. For some years, no khan was mentioned, and then two young boys in succession appeared as khans with the backing of their respective mothers and other unknown players. Both boys, and apparently their mothers as well, were soon killed by rival factions. As with horses lost in a race, there was much dust and hectic movement, but no clear winner. Moreover, it did not matter who held the office because there was no united nation to rule.

During this period of renewed disintegration, fresh predators stalked the outer fringes of the steppe tribe. Just as wolves hunt the old, young, and weak, the foreign predators began circling the wounded Mongols. The new warlords created a base in the oases of the Silk Route to the west of the Gansu Corridor. These warlords bore Muslim names such as Ibrahim, Issama, and Ismayil or Ismail, but such names may have been adopted merely for commercial convenience in dealing with merchants from Muslim countries. Even Esen had once agreed to a nominal conversion to Islam in order to marry the Muslim khan’s sister and had given two sons Muslim names, but Esen never practiced the faith. The significance of the names remains unclear.

The warlords and their warriors included many of the former imperial guards, particularly the Kipchak, but also some of the Asud of Ossetia. Having lost their stronghold on the Mongolian Plateau during the campaigns of Samur’s husband, son, and grandson Esen, they fled south into the more remote areas of the Gobi and into the deserts of northern China. The warlords’ coalitions included large mixtures of a more mysterious group known alternately as Mekrit, Megrin, and Begrin, who appear only fleetingly but at important moments in the chronicles.

This new threat originated in the oases of Turfan and Hami. These two cities operated as trade centers for long-distance caravans along the thin line of oases connecting China with the Middle East and Europe, but in these days, only a trickle of the former trade flowed through. The cities now served as desert hideaways for rebels and bandits rather than crucial chains in a commercial network. Nevertheless, the oases supported a sufficient agricultural population to accommodate a small military force, and the desert around them offered protection from the Ming army or other enemies.

From a base in Turfan, a new warlord named Beg-Arslan sought to move into the vacuum of Mongol politics, replace Esen, and set up a puppet khan. He planned to make his daughter Yeke Qabar-tu into the khatun of the Mongols by finding a Borijin heir to make khan, and then marrying her to him. This move would effectively allow Beg-Arslan to run the country as the imperial father-in-law. One obstacle to that plan was Yeke Qabar-tu’s reputation as an unattractive woman. Her name meant “Big Nose, ” and for the Mongols, who often referred to themselves with pride as the “No-Nose Mongols, ” the prospect of siring a child with Big Nose lacked appeal. Mongols associated such noses with Westerners, mostly Europeans and Muslims, rather than with East Asians. If nothing else, her Mongol name clearly indicated that Yeke Qabar-tu’s origin, and that of her father, lay beyond the Mongol world.

The male descendants of Genghis Khan had dwindled to just a few, primarily ineffective old men, but also a few young boys whose mothers or other relatives claimed that they had been fathered by Borijin men who had subsequently died. From the contenders, Beg-Arslan selected a modest but tractable man named Manduul, made him Great Khan, and married him to Yeke Qabar-tu sometime between 1463 and 1465.

Despite the ability of warlords to make and unmake the khans and their marriages, they lacked the power to force consummation. The khan did not like Yeke Qabar-tu. He “stayed absent from” her and “did not co-habit with her. ” Not surprisingly, Big Nose produced no children. Some chronicles mention that Manduul was sick in the time that he knew her and that was the reason he did not cohabit with her. Although she continued at court as queen, apparently she and the khan avoided each other as much as was practical.

Of seemingly far less importance, around the year 1464, Manduul married Manduhai, who was about sixteen, nearly twenty-five years his junior. There is nothing surprising about the match, since she came from a political family, but what mixture of political and personal preferences underlay the marriage is not clear. Perhaps she was beautiful and appealed to the khan; perhaps he simply wanted a wife who was not a foreigner.

Some chronicles refer to her by the title khatun, or “queen, ” at this point, but others refer to her merely as a princess, indicating some possible contention or confusion on her initial status at court. Eventually there would be no question about her rank, but it remained ambiguous for her first several years as a wife. She entered quietly. Nothing is mentioned of how she came to be Manduul’s wife, and nothing about her seemed worthy of much attention at the moment. For almost a decade she would have no apparent role to play in political life, but when the moment came, she would seize it and become the most powerful queen in Mongolian history. This child bride would one day lead armies and command a nation, but for now young Manduhai silently watched and learned from everyone around her.

No physical description of Manduhai survives, but as the more beloved wife, Manduhai presumably met some of the simple but precise standards by which Mongols of her era judged beauty. Because the body was so hidden by heavy layers of clothes, the traits of feminine beauty stressed specific facial qualities. Mongols favored a round face with relatively small features; the ideal beauty had a face shaped like the moon, with very pale skin except for bright red cheeks: the redder, the better.

Manduhai did not find the lavish royal tents waiting for her as they had been for the wives of the Great Khans of the earlier Mongol Empire. These luxurious gers of old had been known to accommodate a thousand people, boasting walls lined with silk and fur and furnishings of gold and silver. When those early queens went out on campaigns with their husbands, they traveled in special gers permanently erected on large mobile platforms, pulled across the landscape by several dozen oxen. All of these amenities had disappeared with the end of the imperial era, and at the Mongol royal court, Manduhai probably lived a modest but comfortable life comparable to that of her childhood.

 

Manduhai’s name meant “Rising” or “Ascending” in the sense of the sun rising in the morning, a flag or banner being raised up overhead, or a queen or king being enthroned; in more recent times it has come to mean economic or technological progress. In all senses, it has carried a powerful, awesome, and decidedly sacred connotation. The names Manduul and Manduhai derived from the same root word for ascension, and the similarity of the two could not have been ignored. The marriage match could have been made on the basis of the similarity of names, which may have been interpreted as a sign of their nuptial destiny, or Manduul could have changed or modified his queen’s name to make it more similar to his when they married. Whether merely coincidental or artificially contrived, the similarity would have been viewed as seemly.

Manduul held the title of Great Khan of the Mongol Empire. This title represented a claim to be not merely the ruler of the Mongols, but also the legitimate ruler of China, Korea, Manchuria, and Central Asia, albeit in exile—though in truth he did not even rule his own household. Beg-Arslan had taken the lesser title of taishi, but he operated mostly south of the Gobi, where he could better exploit the richer resources there.

Manduul remained north of the Gobi, although it is not clear if this was his choice of refuge or if Beg-Arslan sent him there to limit his influence. So long as he controlled the trade in and out of Mongolia and maintained access to conscript Mongolian boys as needed for his raids, Beg-Arslan seemed unconcerned with where Manduul stayed, so long as it was out of the way.

In a nomadic society, a herder’s campsite reveals much about that individual’s character and temperament. Choices about fall, winter, spring, and summer camps demonstrate a pattern and a way of thinking. Does the herder care most about what is good for the horses or the cows? Is he inclined to take risks or seek security? Does he prefer the solitude of the Gobi or the fertility of the steppe? Is the herder a loner far from others or a convivial person who wants neighbors?

Although a khan needs to worry about the welfare of the people more than his own herd of animals, his choice of location still reveals his spirit and ambitions. Manduul and Manduhai made their capital camp far away from the centers of action in China and along the Silk Route. They set up their mobile court in an area called Mongke Bulag, a tributary of the Old Orkhon River. The name Mongke Bulag meant “Perpetual Spring” or “Eternal Source, ” indicating a constant flow of water throughout the year. The small canyon-valleys with permanent springs offered the basic requirements for a comfortable winter camp, and the surrounding steppe had ample grass in the summer, but also enough wind to keep away mosquitoes. It was good for camels, goats, and cows—especially for horses and sheep—but lacked the elevation necessary to support yaks.

The landscape evoked a pleasant intimate feeling of almost isolated tranquility, and its same small scale indicates that it lacked sufficient grazing for the number of animals needed to support a large army or even a large court of retainers. The location indicates that Manduul did not have a large army, and he was not trying to assemble one.

Only a few days’ horse ride downstream to the northwest, the much wider pastures of the old imperial area of Karakorum would have offered far more extensive grazing for the horses of a more ambitious khan. By contrast, Mongke Bulag resembled a defensive retreat or possibly a place of forced exile and confinement, providing Manduul with little opportunity to influence trade or diplomacy.

According to most texts, Manduul had no children, and he possibly did not reside in the same ger with either Manduhai or Yeke Qabartu. Yet occasionally two women, Borogchin and Esige, are mentioned as daughters of Manduhai. Since they were too old to have been born to Manduhai during her marriage to Manduul, they appear to have been close female relatives of Manduul, possibly daughters from a prior marriage of Manduul, or more likely each was a niece or younger sister who lived with him as a daughter. Soon after the arrival of Manduhai, Borogchin married either Beg-Arslan or his son and went to live with her husband in the south.

The old khan certainly had no sons, but he had two distant male relatives. Each was a rival heir-in-waiting, and each tried to cultivate a close relationship with the old khan in the hope of succeeding him. Just as important, each of the potential heirs needed a close relationship with the queen in order for her to accept him as her next husband in the event of Manduul’s death.

The strongest rival was clearly Une-Bolod, an accomplished warrior and a member of the Borijin clan, albeit through descent from Genghis Khan’s brother Khasar rather than directly from Genghis Khan himself. Such men, however, had held the office in the past. His genealogy may not have been ideal, but it clearly qualified him for the position. Regarding his heritage, he was quoted as saying that what mattered most was that all the members of the family descended from Hoelun’s womb, thereby making his ancestor Khasar and Genghis Khan equal. His most compelling advantage as a potential heir derived from his record of military accomplishments in a time when the Mongols seemed woefully lacking in the skills for which they had once been so renowned. During the time of Esen’s rule, Une-Bolod had taken refuge on the Onon River out of loyalty to his Borijin clan.

The other rival was still more an unproven boy than a man. He had no record of accomplishing anything, but he was almost precisely Manduhai’s age and came from a similar background to hers. He was the young boy Bayan Mongke, whom Samur Gunj had rescued from Esen’s murderous rampage.

In the years after Esen’s death, when there were long stretches without a khan, Une-Bolod served as the head of the family from the traditional homeland of Genghis Khan on the Onon River. When Samur sent the infant Bayan Mongke to safety among the Mongols, it was to Une-Bolod’s territory in eastern Mongolia that he fled. Despite Une-Bolod’s seniority by a decade or more, he recognized the infant as his “elder brother, ” meaning from the lineage of the elder brother Genghis Khan, and therefore having priority in the line of succession to become Great Khan. Une-Bolod placed the infant with a herding family, possibly with the expectation that he might be lost or forgotten over time. The family lived in a remote and isolated section of the South Gobi, where a very sparse but mixed population of Mongols and former Tangut eked out a meager subsistence.

Because of the way that they grew up, Bayan Mongke and Manduhai had more in common with each other than they had with either Manduul or Une-Bolod. Although reared on opposite sides of the Gobi, both Manduhai and Bayan Mongke experienced a similar life in nomadic gers and subsisted from the same kind of traditional steppe herding. They resided far from the bizarre combination of stifling constriction and wanton privilege that marked court life. Although Genghis Khan had lived nearly three hundred years earlier, in many ways the childhoods of Manduhai and Bayan Mongke, possibly more than any other descendants’, resembled his. Like him, they had been raised on the margins rather in the center of the territory.

As herders, rather, they learned to wrestle animals into control, to always keep camels separated from horses because of their natural antipathy for one another, and to recognize where the cows could graze undisturbed by goats and sheep. They learned how to disassemble the ger, load the entire household onto only five camels in a precisely ordered fashion, move to a new camp, and rebuild the home. They knew when to bring the animals to shelter before a storm or how to track them afterward.

A child of the steppe was trained for survival and for constantly making vital decisions. Every morning, the herder steps out of the ger, looks around, and chooses today’s path according to the results of last week’s rain, yesterday’s wind, today’s temperature, or where the animals need to be next week. The quest for pasture is the same each day, but the way to find it varies. If the rains do not come, the herder must find them; if the grass does not grow here, the herder must find where it does. The herder cannot remain in one place, be still, and do nothing. The herder is forced to choose a path every day, time and time again.

While the farmer follows the same path to the same fields every day, the herder looks across a landscape of perpetual possibility. No fences or walls bar the way, but neither are there roads to guide or bridges to cross. The steppe is infinite opportunity. The options depend on the ability of the person who sees them and can find how to utilize them to meet today’s needs. The mountain becomes what the herder makes of it: a barrier to the herd’s migration or a refuge from the harsh blizzards and fierce sandstorms of spring and fall. A stone can be a hammer or something to throw at a lurking wolf, or it may mark the place to make a new hearth for today’s camp.

In such a world, children such as Manduhai and Bayan Mongke had to learn to think to survive. The child should learn from the parents but always be able to act alone and not merely follow orders. Wrong choices inflict terrific pain. A movement in the wrong direction can lead the animals on a death march of slow starvation and thirst. A box canyon may serve as a protected winter camp, but if the grass is insufficient for the animals, they will weaken and the wolves will slowly pick them off one by one. The child of the steppe learns to correct these wrong choices quickly or else die. The rigors of the nomadic life make a child into a self-reliant, hardy, and independent adult.

Both Manduhai and Bayan Mongke also knew the experience of being suddenly plucked from this pastoral life and taken to the royal court of an elderly relative. The new life not only freed them from the unending chores of daily herding life but also offered enticing opportunities for adventure.

After surviving the repeated attempts to kill him in infancy, Bayan Mongke reached sexual maturity, if not adulthood, early. At age fourteen he became a father and at fifteen became an unwilling contender for the title of Great Khan, an office that he did not yet want and was destined never to achieve.

He fathered a baby boy with Siker, the daughter of the Uriyanghai commoner family with whom he found refuge near the modern border of Mongolia and China. Her father seemed anxious to raise the family status by acquiring a Borijin son-in-law and grandchild, and rather than adopting Bayan Mongke as a son, he treated him as resident son-in-law performing bride service. Siker was probably a few years older than he, since girls of that era normally did not become reproductive before age sixteen and were rarely allowed to marry before that age. The chronicles describe their relationship as a marriage, but the evidence suggests that neither Siker nor Bayan Mongke developed a liking for the other, nor for the baby they shared.

 

Bayan Mongke was the grandson of Esen on his mother’s side and of Manduul Khan’s elder half brother on his father’s side. In addition to this bone bond, both the elder and the younger man had Oirat mothers. Manduul saw in the young boy a much less threatening heir than the warrior Une-Bolod. As a rival to Une-Bolod’s hope to become khan, Bayan Mongke helped to insulate the old khan from possible assassination or overthrow.

About the same time that Manduhai came to live as the wife of Manduul Khan, the old khan brought Bayan Mongke to court. Manduul apparently saw in Bayan Mongke the son he never had, plus the prospect of revitalizing the long-moribund court life. Whether for political or emotional reasons, the old uncle and his young nephew formed an unusual partnership. Each seemed to energize the other, and both perceived a benefit from the novel union.

At the court, Bayan Mongke made a dashing appearance, which he knew how to use to his advantage. He was young and handsome, with a flair of his own. He wore a brocade deel embroidered with gold and lined with squirrel fur, and he had a strong preference for riding chestnut horses. As a sign of his rank, he wore a golden belt, an object of majestic symbolism to the Mongols of that era. The Idiqut of the Uighurs had referred to the golden belt when he said to Genghis Khan: “If I receive but a ring from your golden belt, I will become your fifth son and will serve you. ”

Manduul Khan bestowed on Bayan Mongke the title of jinong, meaning “Golden Prince” but signifying that he was now the heir and therefore the crown prince of the Mongols. After khan, the title of jinong had the highest prestige in the country. The importance of the office was evident in a Mongol saying: “In the blue sky above, there are the sun and the moon. And on the earth below, there are the Khan and the Jinong. ”

Bayan Mongke’s promotion also meant a demotion for Une-Bolod to the third most important member of the clan. As the new jinong, Bayan Mongke assumed formal responsibility for the ger shrine to Genghis Khan, and he acquired possession of the black sulde from General Une-Bolod, who had been in control of the land and shrines, and who had been, at least unofficially, the presumed heir to the throne.

Despite all the attached ritual duties and ceremonial authority, the office of jinong lacked genuine authority over anything. Neither khan nor jinong exercised the real power since it was in the hands of foreign warlords; Beg-Arslan held the lower-ranking title of taishi, but actually exercised control of the comings and goings of people and goods in and out of Mongolian territory.

Sometime between 1463 and 1465, Manduul also changed Bayan Mongke’s name to Bolkhu, meaning “Rising Up” or “Coming Up, ” which carried similar connotations to his own and to Manduhai’s “Rising. ” The chronicles make it appear that Manduul installed his nephew not merely as his heir, but as a complete co-ruler. The uncle and nephew lived together “in peace and harmony, ” and together they “brought the nation under control with strength and power. ” The language used reflected the same organizational techniques used by Genghis Khan in his metaphor of the two shafts on the cart of state.

The chronicles do not describe the ceremony of installation for the Golden Prince, but based upon the golden belt, horse, and deel that he received, the ceremony seemed similar to the one during which Genghis Khan and his childhood friend and eventual ally Jamuka exchanged vows of brotherhood before a “leafy tree” in the Khork-honag Valley, agreeing to become two shafts of one cart. In that ceremony, each of the men put a golden belt around the waist of the other, and they exchanged horses. “They declared themselves sworn friends and loved each other, ” according to the Secret History. Afterward, “they enjoyed themselves reveling and feasting, and at night they slept together, the two of them alone under their blanket. ”

Bayan Mongke was close in age to Manduhai, and their youthful presence brought a renewed vigor to the staid Mongol court. However, they seemed more rivals than potential partners. He was admired and became the center of court attention, while she seemed ignored by her husband and everyone else, except for General Une-Bolod.

Compared with her aging husband, Une-Bolod was a vigorous man. Compared with the inexperienced crown prince, he was a mature man. While her husband had led an undistinguished life on the margins and the crown prince was much too young to have any accomplishments, Une-Bolod was a traditional Mongol man, a proven warrior. From the start, he seemed aware of Manduhai’s future importance, knowing that the man who had her favor after her husband’s death would become the new khan.

The young crown prince had none of this sophistication. He had won the total support of his uncle, and now his interest was not so much in wooing the attention of a future queen as in striking out for new adventures. He was ready to raid, take to the battlefield, and make his mark in the world.

Without any major accomplishments of his own, Manduul Khan seemed eager to support Bayan Mongke’s aspiration. Manduul’s first effort was to gain control of the local area. The khan and the prince set out to impose their authority on the tribes in central Mongolia. They used the excuse of avenging the murder of Manduul’s predecessor, the boy Molon Khan, but through a series of campaigns they seemed to be establishing control over their base in order to mount a challenge to Beg-Arslan, or whoever came to power in the south. Mounted on his pale chestnut horse, Bayan Mongke led the army and brought the surrounding tribes back into submission under Manduul, who accompanied his heir but did not participate in the fighting.

Conquering other Mongols and raiding small camps may have been gratifying to a young man on his first escapade and to an old man whose life had lacked adventure, but it produced little material or political result. One tribe was about as poor as the next. For real raiding and plunder, they had to look south of the Gobi to the Silk Route or to the Chinese cities. Just at this fortuitous moment, a message arrived informing the Mongol court that the Ming emperor had died in Beijing some months earlier in 1464.

 

Bayan Mongke had not only a claim on China by virtue of his descent from his ancestors Genghis and Khubilai Khan, who had conquered the country, he had an even more immediate connection to the dead emperor. This was the same emperor whom Bayan Mongke’s grandfather Esen had once captured and held prisoner in 1449.

The crown prince longed for action, and he wanted to break away from the tranquil isolation of the Mongol royal family. He did not seem sure of what he specifically sought to achieve, but he wanted something spectacular. It would not suffice to conquer neighboring clans and fight the endless Mongol feuds. He aspired to follow the heroic tradition of his ancestor Genghis Khan, to conquer whole kingdoms and assemble an empire. The route to fame and glory ran to the south, across the Gobi to the oases of the Silk Route or the cities of China, and now with the death of the old Ming emperor, fate seemed to have opened an opportunity for him in China.

The preoccupation of the Ming court with the rituals and the internecine struggles accompanying the death of the old emperor and the transition to a new emperor provided young Bayan Mongke his opportunity to strike out toward the south and prove himself as a would-be conqueror and future khan of the Mongols. Even if he could not persuade his aged great-uncle to make the journey, he could do it himself. Manduul allowed his nephew to go accompanied by Une-Bolod, the Mongol’s most experienced military leader.

To reach China from the Mongol court, Bayan Mongke and his small party of soldiers had to travel six to eight weeks from the Old Orkhon down the Ongi River, which they followed south into the Gobi until the river dried out in the desert. Moving across routes leading from one spring to another, the army would need to cross the desert, interspersed with several small clumps of mountains, and then finally descend from the Mongolian Plateau into Inner Mongolia.

The small Mongol force lacked the ability to conquer even a single Chinese city, but the Mongols devised a strategy of following the example of Genghis Khan, who acquired a beachhead south of the Gobi by making an alliance with the Onggud prior to his invasion of China. Now these same lands were occupied by Mongols allied to the Ming but performing the same old Onggud function of guarding China from assault by the tribes of the north. Bayan Mongke and Manduul sought to use their ethnic ties and shared heritage to reunite the Mongols north of the Gobi with the ones living under Chinese control. Many more Mongols lived in China under Ming rule than in Mongolia, and perhaps if unity could be reasserted between the two groups, they might be able to overcome the Chinese once again and restore the empire.

Only a teenager could have had such a dream, and only an inexperienced old man could have encouraged him in it. Bayan Mongke headed off on his first major assignment. He rode into the border zone to lure the Mongols away from the Ming and to negotiate a pan-Mongol alliance. He found a receptive audience among the Mongols, who had grown weary of the Ming rule and the unfulfilled promises and obligations of the court. As a youthful soldier, apparently destined to one day become the Great Khan of the Mongol nation, Bayan Mongke excited their pride and ambition. For those prone toward imperial nostalgia and visions of Mongol glory, the dream rose again of uniting the tribes and restoring Mongol rule over China. For those who wished more material rewards, Bayan Mongke stimulated greed for the days when the Mongols controlled all the productive wealth of China and the mercantile traffic of the Silk Road.

 

Both the Mongols and the Ming court maintained false and often silly perceptions of themselves and each other. Every society produces its own cultural conceits, a set of lies and delusions about itself that thrives in the face of all contrary evidence. The Mongols believed that they could not be completely defeated. Even after being driven back north of the Gobi, they still pretended to be the rightful rulers of China and much of the rest of the world. The Mongol royal court was just waiting for a shift in the will of heaven that would propel them back to their rightful place as rulers of the most extensive empire on earth. To fill in the gaps between their beliefs and reality, they sat around the fire telling of clever Mongol concubines, morally lax Chinese queens, oversexed Mongol soldiers, impotent Chinese emperors, and secret pregnancies. All the tales ended with the deception of Chinese court officials and the conclusion that through some form of clever deceit, the Ming emperor was really a Mongol. Thus, the Mongols had never been truly defeated or chased out of China, merely replaced by some of their Mongol kinsmen in another guise. The men chuckled over the stories and then headed out to hunt another marmot and gather some dried cow dung to build a fire.

These stories also served as justification for any type of raid or military expedition. They had a story that while the Ming emperor had been held captive by the Mongols, he fathered a son with a Mongol girl. Thus, if needed, they had yet one more claim to be the legitimate rulers of China and even to have the legitimate heir of the dead Ming emperor. In the intervening years, the identity of the girl and her son had been lost, but they could certainly be found if needed. The justification, however, did not matter until the Mongols had a sufficiently strong military force to rival the Ming. The story of the secret heir might be useful as a propaganda tool for legitimizing their rule if they conquered China, but it had little use in rallying Mongols to fight.

The Mongols undermined the truth of their defeats with sexual intrigue; the Ming courtiers undermined the truth of their failures by renaming and redefining it. The Chinese believed that they had never really been conquered at all. By assigning Chinese names to each of the foreign conquerors, they almost obliterated the unpleasant memory of alien domination. Periodically, the eunuchs of the court invited in a Mongol horse trader, dressed him in elegant new clothes, gave him a letter glorifying the Ming emperor, and ushered him into the court, which accepted his goods as foreign tribute and gave him lavish gifts in return. Later the eunuchs could laugh over the filthy fingers and crude manners of the barbarians as they slurped bowls of hot noodles, and then return to drawing pornographic pictures to give to the next foreign delegation.

After one hundred years in power, the Ming Dynasty had spent its initial vigor and matured into a protracted middle age. Prior to Esen’s capture of the Ming emperor, the dynasty had its confidence, even if it lacked youthful energy. After the capture, the nation suffered from a lack of both, and their traditionally exaggerated fears of the Mongols began to haunt the Chinese once again. The nervous fear clouded every diplomatic discussion and prevented the court from uniting behind a single comprehensive policy of how to deal with the barbarian threat.

As the Ming weakened and the turmoil among the Mongols continued, renegade Mongols began making deeper and more frequent raids into Chinese territory. The renewed raiding seemed closely tied to Bayan Mongke’s coming of age and his expanding prominence at court as jinong, and Chinese chroniclers showed an increasing fear of him and other Mongol raiding parties.

 

In plotting to attack the Chinese cities, young Bayan Mongke faced an unusual foe headed by a teenage emperor of almost the same age. The Ming heir became emperor in approximately the same year that Bayan Mongke became crown prince. Their lives were marked by similar experiences of near death, years in hiding, and then sudden elevation to power at the center of a powerful court. Esen’s campaigns against their families had been the source of the early suffering for both of them.

But in addition to these odd similarities, there were marked differences as well. The power behind Bayan Mongke was his older uncle; the power behind the Chinese emperor Chenghua was his older nursemaid, Lady Wan, whom he loved.

The new emperor had been born in 1447 just before Esen captured his father. During his father’s captivity, the little crown prince Chenghua lost his position, had his name changed, was shunted aside, and lived in constant danger of being killed. The harsh uncertainty of his perilous childhood left him a nervous and introverted child, made all the worse by a severe stutter when trying to pronounce words beginning with s, zh, ch, and sh sounds. Within the closed world of his nursery, Wan nourished and entertained the shy, vulnerable boy. She dressed herself and him in military uniforms, played elaborate games, and staged colorful and exciting military charades with real soldiers.

In 1464, at age seventeen, the emperor ascended the throne when Lady Wan was thirty-two years old. For as long as he could remember, she had been his most intimate companion and his protector, and at the appropriate time she had initiated him into sex. Although it was common for the servant women to meet an emperor’s sexual needs when required, such women came and went with little more notice than the changing flowers in a vase; but this young emperor seemed inordinately attached to his nurse.

When he became emperor, he married an appropriately aristocratic lady in order to have an official empress. She quickly learned of his attachment to Wan, and she bitterly resented it. Within weeks of being installed in her new status as the highest-ranking woman in the empire, Empress Wu claimed that the nursemaid had been discourteous to her and ordered that she be flogged in a clear show of rank and resentment. Outraged, the teenage emperor stripped his wife of her title of empress after only a month and a day in office, banishing her to a remote palace within the Imperial City, where she lived out the next forty-five years until her death.

Chenghua could not make a servant into an empress, even one as beloved as Wan, but he continued to live openly with her. Two years later, when the emperor was nineteen and Lady Wan was thirty-six, she gave birth to a son, who soon died. After the death, officials began writing memoranda to the emperor, asking him to seek relations with other women in his household in order to produce an heir and, as an intended but not stated consequence, to decrease the power of Lady Wan, her family, and her entourage. The emperor obliged by having a son with one of his wives, but the child died suddenly just after being declared the heir. Suspicion naturally fell on Lady Wan, but the emperor stood fast by her.

Following the loss of their son, the emperor showed no lessening of his commitment to Lady Wan, despite her inability to get pregnant again. Although she could not appear in court as the official empress in the gowns and clothes that accompanied the title, Lady Wan chose her own individual way of marking her identity: She often chose to wear men’s military clothes. As the only woman at court dressed as a general, she flaunted her unique position.

 

The Chinese sources report that Bayan Mongke of the Mongols came into Chinese territory and met with the local Mongol leaders; they blamed the young prince for instigating the troubles that followed. Soon after the suspicious visit, Mongols on the border revolted against their Ming overlords. They rose up in 1468, exactly one hundred years after the Ming expelled the Mongol khans of the Yuan Dynasty.

Bayan Mongke was not Esen. He stirred up some mild enthusiasm with the border Mongols, stoked the ashes of past glory, and tempted their appetites for adventure and plunder. During this time, the Ming border guards, disguised as Mongol bandits, raided the goods being sent to the loyal Mongols who were helping the Ming protect the border. This system of theft had frequently been used by the underpaid and underappreciated Chinese soldiers to supplement their difficult life in a forsaken post. The local commanders, who benefited from the corruption, wrote back reports blaming all such raids on outlaw Mongols. In addition, when the Mongols loyal to the Ming attempted to send tribute to the emperor, Chinese soldiers robbed them as well, and again blamed it on other, savage Mongols living in the wild. The local Mongols lost their goods and got the blame for the robbery.

The misconduct of these Ming soldiers probably had more to do with causing the border tensions than the arrival of the ineffectively young crown prince of the Mongols. Fearful of the discontent brewing along the border, and fully aware of the danger Bayan Mongke’s visit might spark among these tentatively loyal Mongols, the Ming court sent out an expedition to capture the provocateur and reinforce its authority. If they could capture the heir to the title of Great Khan of the Yuan, they might have their ultimate triumph over the old dynasty, which still had not surrendered. By luck, the first Ming force sent to capture Bayan Mongke failed in the summer of 1468, but in the following year, a stronger force arrived and, by cutting off the supply of food to the border Mongols, quickly starved them out by early 1469. Bayan Mongke managed to escape back north into the Gobi and on home, but the Ming forces captured the local Mongol leader and hailed the feat as another great victory over the barbarians.

The records of this time remain silent on what happened at the Mongol court during the absence of Bayan Mongke. Yet events would soon unfold to show that Manduhai, unseen and unheard, had been making her own alliances. As the aging khan weakened and the young khan dashed about on the Chinese frontier, Manduhai solidified her position, made a few allies, and prepared as best she could for the uncertain fate ahead. For her, everything up until then had been a training period in which she watched, learned, and waited. Soon she would have the opportunity to test her skills.

For the moment, she had two rivals, both about her same age and at the start of their careers. Her immediate rival for power at court and within Mongolia was Bayan Mongke. In the longer term, however, she and the Ming emperor, using intermediaries and proxies, would become involved in an indirect but lifelong struggle for control over the borderlands, while living lives that would have uncanny, and probably not coincidental, similarities.

 

 

 

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